A university voted to Austin.

The University of Texas was placed by popular vote. Wikipedia’s history of the university records that on March 30, 1881 the Texas legislature organised its structure and called for a statewide vote on its location; Austin was chosen for the main university and Galveston for the medical department. The cornerstone of the original Main Building was laid on November 17, 1882, on what was called College Hill, and the university opened on September 15, 1883.

That original building was Victorian Gothic, designed by Frederick Ernst Ruffini and Abner Cook, and for half a century it stood at the centre of the campus’s forty-acre site. Wikipedia records that by the 1930s the university needed more library space, and the old Main Building was razed in 1934 over the objections of many students and faculty. Its replacement, the present Main Building with its tower, was designed by the architect Paul Philippe Cret in the Beaux-Arts manner and completed in 1937. Its tower is a fixture of the identity in a literal sense: it is lit white in the evening, lit burnt orange for occasions such as athletic victories and academic achievements, and darkened for solemn ones.

Before the tower there was the ribbon. In a long history of the colour published in The Alcalde, the magazine of the Texas Exes alumni association, on June 30, 2018, Andrew Roush retold an account Venable Proctor wrote for the same magazine in 1913. On an overcast April day in 1885, a group of students was about to take the train to Georgetown for the university’s baseball game against Southwestern when Gussie Brown, a student from Orange, Texas, pointed out that the Texas supporters had nothing to identify themselves. Proctor and Clarence Miller ran half a block to a general store and asked for two colours of ribbon, whatever was in stock. The storekeeper had plenty of orange and white, and they made it back to the train with it.

For a shade of its own.

Orange and white did not settle in at once. The Alcalde records that students briefly wore gold and white, prompted by the yellow pressed-brick buildings then going up on campus, before the athletics council returned to orange and white; in 1898, tired of stains on white uniforms, it switched to orange and maroon. In 1900 the Board of Regents put the question to students, faculty and alumni, and orange and white won a narrow majority.

The darker shade came from the laundry. On September 19, 1925, The Daily Texan ran a brief item headlined “New Orange Color for Longhorns,” explaining that because other schools were adopting orange and white, the athletics department wanted an orange that would be Texas’ own; a combination of dyes had been used to produce a darker shade, “more of a burnt orange.” The Alcalde notes that the university historian Jim Nicar credits the change to coach E. J. “Doc” Stewart, and that the old dye had a habit of fading toward pale yellow, which earned the team an unflattering nickname from rivals. After Clyde Littlefield took over in 1927, he worked with O’Shea Knitting Mills of Chicago to fix the dye, and the result became known as Texas Orange.

Then the dye disappeared. According to The Alcalde, the Texas Orange dyes had been produced in Germany, and during the Second World War they went off the market; the teams went back to a lighter orange, and in 1950 the regents adopted an official colour rendering of the university seal of 1905 — designed by an engineering professor — in that lighter shade. When coach Darrell K Royal brought the dark orange back, a group of students and alumni petitioned the regents in 1966 to restore the “correct light to medium orange.” A faculty committee chaired by Raymond Vowell instead concluded that tradition and common usage favoured the darker hue, and in 1967 burnt orange became official. The magazine gives the shade as Pantone 159 and notes that the university treats it as protected intellectual property; in 2009 an Austin company dropped the colour from an unofficial campus directory app after the university objected.

Design and documentation.

Technical universities tend to build their identities from a small, durable kit: a formal seal or shield for diplomas and ceremonies, a wordmark for everyday communication, a short list of official colours, and a separate family of athletic marks that carries the same colours onto uniforms, courts and stadium walls. Because engineering and science schools often grew out of trade institutes or land-grant charters, their earliest symbols tend to be practical rather than heraldic, and later identity programmes usually tidy those older marks rather than replace them.

Colour does much of the work. Two-colour schemes, frequently a metallic gold paired with a dark neutral or a saturated red, are fixed by name long before they are fixed by number, so modern guides translate a traditional colour into print, screen and thread specifications. Some campuses add a registered tartan, which turns a colour story into a woven pattern for scarves, pipe bands and graduation regalia.

Mascots extend the system into three dimensions. Costumed characters, live animals and restored vehicles, from vintage cars to locomotive replicas, appear at games and parades, and each one is usually governed by its own usage rules alongside the logo, so that a single colour pair and a consistent letterform hold the whole family together.

A steer’s head in one colour.

The team name came from a student newspaper. Writing in The Alcalde for its September–October 2011 issue, James I. Bowie recorded that the Longhorns name is generally attributed to D. A. Frank of The Daily Texan, who used it in 1903, when the team was also called the Steers, Varsity or State. The name spread after the booster H. J. Lutcher Stark gave the team sideline blankets lettered “Texas Longhorns” in 1913, with a steer head drawn in three-quarter view. Other emblems ran alongside it for decades: an interlocking “UT” monogram, seen on the band in 1905, and a “T” inside a star used by the basketball team in 1919 and by the track team until the mid-1960s. Steer heads appeared on a 1920 war-memorial plaque, on the Longhorn Band’s bass drum in 1922 and over the entrance of Memorial Stadium when it opened in 1924.

The silhouette arrived in 1961. According to Bowie, Darrell Royal, preparing for his fifth season as head coach, asked the sporting-goods merchant William “Rooster” Andrews — a former equipment manager and occasional kicker for the team in the 1940s — to design a team logo, and Andrews came back with a crayon drawing of a longhorn head. Royal asked whether it could go on a helmet. On September 23, 1961, in Berkeley, California, the Longhorns took the field with that simple silhouette on their helmets. Bowie quoted the historian J. Frank Dobie’s 1941 book The Longhorns on why the image had such reach: in the late nineteenth century a pair of horns was the emblem of cattle country, mounted in banks, printed on cheques and letterheads and carved into gun handles.

The live steer predates the silhouette. Wikipedia’s article on Bevo attributes the idea of a live longhorn mascot to the alumnus Stephen Pinckney in 1916; the steer appeared at that year’s Thanksgiving Day game, and the campus magazine editor Ben Dyer gave him the name Bevo. The article notes that a popular story about the name being adapted from a rival’s brand is apocryphal, because the name came months before the branding. The hand signal that mirrors the horns, “Hook ’em Horns,” was introduced at a pep rally in 1955, according to Wikipedia’s article on the university.

For a design guide, the University of Texas at Austin shows how much an identity can carry with two elements — a single dyed colour fought over for decades, and a one-colour steer’s head that began as a crayon drawing. Compare Stanford and the University of Notre Dame. For this guide we use burnt orange, charcoal and limestone with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep University of Texas at Austin’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.